Hospitalist Medicare economics 2024

See what Medicare paid for hospitalist care in 2024.

Original Medicare’s 2024 payments, services and patients per hospitalist, nationally and by state. Choose a state to put its median next to the national one.

Sources & methodology

Original Medicare · 2024

Hospitalist services and payments

20,517 providers billing Medicare under the Hospitalist specialty code (hospitalists enrolled as Internal Medicine or Family Practice aren’t counted). Payments for billed care, not salary.

20,517 providers · All states + DC · 2024

Median Medicare payments were $40,773 per provider.

The middle half of providers were paid between $20,507 and $65,315.

2024 All states + DC: Medicare services and payments per hospitalist, by percentile.
Measure 25th percentileMedian75th percentile90th percentile
Services per providerFrom CMS · services 2344787861,112
Medicare patients per providerFrom CMS · patients 107196301407
Allowed amount per providerFrom CMS · USD $26,261$52,067$83,324$118,272
Medicare payment per providerFrom CMS · USD $20,507$40,773$65,315$93,057
Standardized payment per providerFrom CMS · USDSame payment rates in every state, so local price differences drop out. $20,278$40,148$64,303$90,867
Services per patientCalculated by Aclera · services / patient 1.962.593.083.65
Standardized payment per patientCalculated by Aclera · USD / patientStandardized payment divided by the provider’s Medicare patients. $158.38$205.26$247.25$295.39
Submitted charges / allowed amountCalculated by Aclera · ratioHow far above Medicare’s allowed amount the charges were set. A billing-office number, not a clinical one. 2.272.823.554.89

Source: CMS provider data. Methodology and source files

Reading the spread

Every provider with the specialty code counts, full year or not, so the low end of each row includes part-timers, July starts and people who left in March. The file doesn’t record FTE or start dates, so the spread isn’t a measure of how hard anyone worked. Quote the median, and don’t read the spread as a census.

Why it’s a fraction of a salary

Original Medicare is one payer. The Medicare Advantage, commercial, Medicaid and self-pay patients on your list aren’t in this table. Even with every payer counted, professional fees don’t cover a hospitalist salary at most hospitals, and the hospital makes up the difference because it needs the service. This file doesn’t record that. The gap between this number and your pay is structural, not a grade on you, and it’s why the staffing and subsidy conversation happens over the group’s own collections rather than any public file.

Common questions

Why is my state’s median so far below the national one?

Often it’s Medicare Advantage. Where more seniors are in MA plans, fewer of your patients are in this file, and every per-provider row drops with them. It can also be a state where hospitalists tend to enroll under Internal Medicine, which pulls them out of this table.

Sources & methodology

Who is included

Providers CMS lists under the Hospitalist specialty in the 50 states and DC, placed by their location in the 2024 file. CMS leaves out anyone with 10 or fewer Medicare patients.

Allowed amount and Medicare payment

The allowed amount is what Medicare approved for the care: Medicare’s share plus what the patient or a secondary payer owed. The Medicare payment row is Medicare’s share alone.

How the figures are calculated

Each provider counts once. Percentiles interpolate between neighboring ranks, and ratios are worked out per provider before the percentile is taken. A state needs at least 11 providers before we show a distribution, the same cutoff CMS uses to hide any figure drawn from 10 or fewer patients. In the 2024 file every provider reported every measure, so nothing was excluded.

Patients and services

A patient can appear under several providers, so adding the counts double-counts people. CMS counts services its own way and the unit varies with the kind of service, so services don’t convert into admissions, shifts, or wRVUs.

When the data updates

CMS releases these data annually and may issue corrections. We keep each year separately and record the exact source file below.

CMS Medicare services and payments

Provider-level data for Original Medicare.

2024 data · Released May 21, 2026 · Downloaded Oct 6, 2026

Source files and calculation details

Source: Original provider CSV · CMS data dictionary

Observation year: 2024. Method version 1.0.0. Provider rows in the source file: 1,296,739, every specialty. The hospitalist rows are the subset in the tables above.

Source SHA-256: e9e779645b5dd8fdd39e8533df525899b488a66863bb51ea8644ec59861feefc

Provider source fields: Tot_Srvcs, Tot_Benes, Tot_Mdcr_Alowd_Amt, Tot_Mdcr_Pymt_Amt, Tot_Mdcr_Stdzd_Amt and Tot_Sbmtd_Chrg. No service codes or proprietary descriptions are used.

Also from Aclera

Work through your next admission with Casey

Casey is the assistant in CasePanel, Aclera’s note-writing app for hospitalists. You paste or upload the chart, nothing connects to your EHR, and Casey reads all of it before you write, then drafts the HPI and A&P for you to edit.

14-day trial. No credit card required.

All calculators